Need help on SEO for Google - will restructuring help or hurt?

[Rickard]

I am the lead developer of an open source product. During the latest Google PR update, the PR for our website dropped from 8 to 7. I've never really paid any attention to PR and SEO, but this latest drop caught my interest. I've been thinking of some ways to bring it back up to 8. Here are some thought I have on the matter. Please comment and/or correct me.

It's my guess that the reason we have such as high PR is because there are lots of sites linking to our site (the forum footer contains a link). There might be other factors involved, but I think this makes the biggest difference on PR.

The majority of all links pointing at our website point at www.example.com. However, for various reasons, I would very much like to get rid of the www part and consolidate all our web resources under the domain example.com. To do this, I started by setting up a 301 permanent redirect that redirects any URL containing www to the www-less equivalent. I also requested an update in dmoz and updated various other sites such as hotscripts and freshmeat to reflect the change. With new versions of the software, we'll remove the www from the footer so that any future links will point directly at example.com. www.example.com and example.com both are PR7. Will "joining" them with a 301 redirect affect the PR?

Luckily, lots of pages in our suppport discussion forum are indexed by the major search engines and spiders frequently crawl the forums. However, the forums are located at forums.example.com. Would moving them to example.com/forums and setting up a 301 redirect for existing backlinks help the PR of example.com?

Apart from a relatively small number of sponsored links on the site, we offer anyone who makes a donation to the project of a certain amount gets a link on our donations page. The high PR of the site and the prospect of a permanent backlink has sparked quite a few donations over the years. However, this has resulted in a donations list with quite a few outbound links

Does having a large number of outbound links (sometimes completely unrelated to the site) hurt the PR? If so, does it hurt the PR of the entire site or just that particular page?

I would appreciate any help I could get on the matter.

Cheers,
Rickard

<Sorry, no specifics.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 10:10 pm (utc) on May 3, 2007]

[g1smd]

Chasing PR purely as a number is a pointless and often futile exercise.

Optimise all areas of your site: page titles, meta description, site structure, internal navigation, duplicate content issues, moving to CSS in external files, proper usage of heading, paragraph, list, table and form tags, and so on, and what will follow will be deserved.

Join link schemes, try getting one up on Google with dodgy code, or dodgy redirects, or just try bending your results by nefarious means, and you'll probably suffer a downfall of some sort.